What’s It Like?
by Jerry Oltion
Illustration by Janet Aulisio
When a man switches to a woman’s body, the first thing he does is feel his breasts. The first thing a woman does in a man’s body is pee standing up. There are exceptions, of course, but those are by far the most common reactions. Margaret DeBeau, chief psychologist for the Cognitive Displacement Project, established that in tests not long after they ironed the bugs out of the Tilbey Transfer process.
Of course after their initial solo experimentation the test subjects mated like rabbits, just to see what it felt like from the other side. Margaret wasn’t concerned with that aspect of the trial. Interested, in a prurient sort of way, since she needed both hands to count the years since she had last mated like anything; and amused the first few times the subjects blushingly tried to describe their experience during the debriefing after they’d switched back to their original bodies, but she was hardly surprised. People had always wondered what their partners felt during sex. She would have been interested only if they hadn’t tried it.
The fascinating part of the gender-switching study came when Arthur Brinsley walked into her office a day after they began the extended duration switchover test and said, “Margaret, can I have a little girl-to-girl chat with you?” He was wearing Candi Jenssen’s body, and doing a pretty good job of it. No hesitation when he walked, no trouble sitting down in one of the two chairs beside Margaret’s desk.
She turned away from the window where she had been watching a caterpillar spin its cocoon on a branch just beyond the glass.
“Girl to girl?” she asked lightly. “Going native, are you?”
He giggled. It sounded exactly like Candi’s giggle. Then he blushed just the way Candi did when she caught herself doing something dumb. Something “blonde,” she would say in self-deprecation.
“Yes, as a matter of fact, I am going native. That’s what I want to talk about.” He leaned forward in his chair, accidentally giving Margaret a generous view of Candi’s breasts. She made a mental note to warn him about that when he was done talking, before he compromised Candi’s modesty to everyone else on the project, but the next thing he said blew that thought straight out of her mind. “I can’t help giggling,” he said. “And preening whenever a man is around. It’s like this insane little hiccup the body does without me.”
While she’d been watching the caterpillar spin, Margaret had been wondering if anything truly interesting would come of this project, or whether she had merely derailed one undistinguished career for another when she’d joined the CDP team. She had gambled that fringe science would provide the reward that clinical psychology never had, and she had to admit it was a lot more exciting to be on the frontier of something for a change, but so far nothing had quite satisfied her longing for—what? She didn’t know. This, however, seemed promising.
First rule of investigation: define the terms. “Preening?” Margaret asked. “Like how?”
“I don’t know, like—” Arthur ran his hand through his hair—Candi’s hair, which came down to her shoulders—then flipped it back with a careless toss of his head. “Like that. And I blink like I’ve got something in my eyes, and I do this silly turn-the-head-sideways thing while I do it.” He acted out a cartoonish parody of a woman on the make.
Margaret laughed out loud at the sight of Candi’s body doing that. Candi tried so hard to overcome the stereotype that went with her California-blonde looks, and there was Arthur trashing all her hard work in a moment.
“You’re telling me it’s hard-wired?”
“Apparently. And…” he hesitated, blushing again. “And I get all gushy and stupid around Huang Lee.”
“Huang Lee? Candi doesn’t even like him.”
“Want to bet?” asked Arthur.
“Sure I—hah. No way.” Margaret remembered Candi’s first week in the lab, back when they were still getting started with the actual hardware. She and Huang were instant partners, spending long hours calibrating the brainwave recorders and the neural overlay masks, and disrupting the entire lab with their constant chatter—until she had realized he was gay. They still worked together after that, but it was much quieter. Huang had come to Margaret a few days later and asked if she thought he had been wrong to tell her, and she’d told him no, stringing Candi along would have been the worse offense, but Candi had still taken it hard.
That was two years ago. Had she secretly harbored the hots for him all this time?
“Is it just him?” she asked, “or do you feel the same way around anyone else?”
“It’s strongest with him, but I’m attracted at least a little bit to practically every man I see.” Arthur giggled again. “Except for Dr. Hayward.”
Hayward was the project leader, an awkward, cadaverous but brilliant man in his sixties. “What’s wrong with him?” Margaret asked anyway, wanting Arthur’s reason, not her own speculation.
“I don’t know,” Arthur said. He absently scratched his right breast, then flinched when he realized what he was doing. “Sorry,” he said. “Bras itch.”
“Tell me about it. So what’s wrong with Hayward? Purely scientific curiosity, of course.”
“Of course.” He leaned back in his chair. “Hell, I don’t know. When I think about it, the whole concept is faintly nauseating no matter who I’m attracted to. There’s just no chemistry between Candi’s body and Hayward, that’s all.”
A loud banging on the door made both of them jump. “Yeow! What? What is it?” Margaret asked.
Candi stuck her head in. She was wearing Arthur’s body. They hadn’t begun three-way swaps yet. “Sorry,” she said. “I don’t know my own strength.”
“I forgot to warn you how macho I was,” Arthur said, giggling.
“I’ll say. Do you mind if I join you? Or were you discussing something private?”
“Arthur?” Margaret asked.
“No, it’s fine.” He looked over at Candi. “I probably should have gone to you first anyway, but you didn’t answer your pager.”
Candi hung Arthur’s head like a boy caught sneaking a peek up someone’s dress. “I was outside throwing rocks at the mailbox. It’s amazing how good a shot you are.”
Arthur shrugged. “I used to play baseball.”
“Maybe that explains the spitting.” Candi pulled the other office chair over next to Arthur so they could talk in a triangle.
“Spitting?” Arthur said.
“Oh yeah!” Candi laughed Arthur’s deep, throaty laugh, then hawked up a major-league goober. She stopped short of gobbing the carpet with it, made a face, and swallowed instead. “It’s like this insane little hiccup your body does without me.”
Margaret’s eyes widened. “You used the same words Arthur did to describe the way he preens now that he’s in your body.”
“Preens? I don’t preen. Do I?”
Arthur answered her with the same coquettish tilt and flip he had shown Margaret earlier, and as Candi stared at him, horrified, he said “I sure didn’t learn that from anyone else.”
“Oh God.” Candi slumped back in her chair, which creaked ominously under Arthur’s weight. “Did I—do I actually do that?”
Margaret shook her head. “No more than Arthur actually spits.”
“Then how come I do it?” asked Arthur. “Seems to me it’s more of a woman thing than a guy thing.”
Margaret already had a theory, but she didn’t want to bias her test subjects so she asked another question. “Arthur, you were just telling me that you felt some attraction to every man on the project except for Dr. Hayward. Did you notice anything else about that attraction? Any pattern?”